Update, 8/15: Rihanna is the latest celebrity to join the Bang Bang fan club. The singer debuted her latest ink on Instagram, crediting the tattoo artist to the stars with the design. RiRi's new tat features her birth year '1988' in numerals across her ankle.

A post shared by badgalriri (@badgalriri) on Aug 13, 2015 at 12:39pm PDT

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Original Post, 9/16/14: "I didn't want to put a big realistic image of bacon on this beautiful model's body," tattoo artist Keith McCurdy, better known as Bang Bang, tells me over the phone. The model he's referring to, of course, is Cara Delevingne. Last week, smack in the middle of New York Fashion Week, on the roof of a SoHo hotel, McCurdy tattooed the word 'BACON' in all caps across the bottom of the supermodel's slender foot. "She'd been asking for an image of bacon for a year now," McCurdy says. "It's difficult to capture small, so I thought it could be more subtle. I said, 'Why don't we spell it?'" Delevingne promptly posted her new ink to Instagram, where it's since accrued over 315,000 likes.

McCurdy may have only been called into the chaos of Fashion Week at the behest of a client—he often finds himself being called into strange situations ("I flew to Panama and drove an hour and a half in the jungle with no cell phone, and I finally find Justin, so I tattoo him," he says of an eye design he nestled into Bieber's bicep while the singer was on the lam for a DUI arrest)—but more and more, he's becoming an industry staple. "It's weird to say, but in a way, I'm a fashion designer now," he says.

A fashion designer to the stars, that is. McCurdy counts Rihanna, Miley Cyrus, Katy Perry, Selena Gomez, Justin Bieber, Rita Ora, and Adele as clients. You'd know that if you're one of the over 780,000 people following @BangBangNYC on Instagram. You'd also know that McCurdy has a tradition with the celebrities he inks: He lets them tattoo him back. On his Instagram feed you'll find the evidence: a cartoon mouse with big muscles called "Swaggy" from Justin Bieber ("The 'swaggy' didn't fill very well so it looks like 'swashy.' I'm all about it"); a peppermint from Katy Perry; and, most recently, a crescent moon from Miley Cyrus. He's quick to answer when I ask which is his favorite: an umbrella from the pop star who made them famous. "I've always loved Rihanna's because Rihanna was my first one," McCurdy says warmly.

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Photo: Bang Bang

He credits much of his success to Rihanna, who he's been tattooing for years, well before she was a one-name-wonder. Their story goes like this: Around seven years ago, McCurdy was 19 and tattooing in a West Village shop he describes as "dirty and nasty." Rihanna walked in to get her nipples pierced and asked her piercer, Joe Snake, who the best tattooer around was. "Joe lied to her and said it was me," McCurdy says with a laugh. "I mean there was no way, at 19, I was the best tattoo artist around." (McCurdy, who is originally from Delaware, got his start tattooing in his mom's kitchen at age 15.) Rihanna and McCurdy hit it off and the rest is history. Rihanna has gotten a lot of tattoos over the last seven years—the winged goddess Isis under her breasts; the gun on her ribcage; 'Rebelle Fleur' written on her neck—and almost all of them are courtesy of Bang Bang.

McCurdy's success, as well as celebrities' seemingly insatiable appetite for ink, points to a larger trend: more people are getting more tattoos. Once strictly the domain of bikers, goth kids, and drunk spring breakers, a recent Pew study on Millennials found that nearly four out of 10 young people (38%) have at least one tattoo. That's compared to 15% of Baby Boomers. What's more, Millennials are more apt to get more than one tattoo: 18% of tattooed Millennials have six or more tattoos compared to just 9% of tattooed adults over the age of 30.

Photo: Bang Bang

With permanent body art on the rise, McCurdy just may have a point about being a new kind of fashion designer. "Ultimately tattooing is kind of the ultimate fashion," he says. Because "it's not changing next spring." To illustrate his point, he references the lion's head he inked on Cara Delevingne's index finger. "She wanted to write the word 'lion' onto her finger for her first tattoo...and I just didn't feel like that was right for her," he says. "I wanted her tattoo to feel like a piece of jewelry. And that tattoo has been on the cover of magazines; people have replicated the idea and the style so much. I mean, it picks up the way that fashion trends pick up. It's cool."

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